KILLALL(1) User Commands KILLALL(1)
NAME
killall - kill processes by name
SYNOPSISkillall [-egiqvw] [-signal] name...killall -l
killall -V
DESCRIPTIONkillall sends a signal to all processes running any of the
specified commands. If no signal name is specified,
SIGTERM is sent.
Signals can be specified either by name (e.g. -HUP) or by
number (e.g. -1). Signal 0 (check if a process exists) can
only be specified by number.
If the command name contains a slash (/), processes exe-
cuting that particular file will be selected for killing,
independent of their name.
killall returns a non-zero return code if no process has
been killed for any of the listed commands. If at least
one process has been killed for each command, killall
returns zero.
A killall process never kills itself (but may kill other
killall processes).
OPTIONS-e Require an exact match for very long names. If a
command name is longer than 15 characters, the full
name may be unavailable (i.e. it is swapped out).
In this case, killall will kill everything that
matches within the first 15 characters. With -e,
such entries are skipped. killall prints a message
for each skipped entry if -v is specified in addi-
tion to -e,
-g Kill the process group to which the process
belongs. The kill signal is only sent once per
group, even if multiple processes belonging to the
same process group were found.
-i Interactively ask for confirmation before killing.
-l List all known signal names.
-q Do not complain of no processes were killed.
-v Report if the signal was successfully sent.
-V Display version information.
-w Wait for all killed processes to die. killall
checks once per second if any of the killed pro-
cesses still exist and only returns if none are
left. Note that killall may wait forever if the
signal was ignored, had no effect, or if the pro-
cess stays in zombie state.
FILES
/proc location of the proc file system
KNOWNBUGS
Killing by file only works for executables that are kept
open during execution, i.e. impure executables can't be
killed this way.
Be warned that typing killallname may not have the
desired effect on non-Linux systems, especially when done
by a privileged user.
killall-w doesn't detect if a process disappears and is
replaced by a new process with the same PID between scans.
AUTHOR
Werner Almesberger <Werner.Almesberger@epfl.ch>
SEEALSO
kill(1), fuser(1), pidof(1), ps(1), kill(2)
Linux Nov 1, 1998 1